Fireworks Effects: Fancy Fills

Solid color with Mesh texture. The Fill panel for this
sample is shown below.

The top sample shows the Bark pattern included with
the Pattern defaults. The lower sample shows a solid color fill with
the Bark file added as a Texture.

Adding texture to a fill
To add a texture to your fill, make sure that the object is selected.
Choose the texture that you would like to add from the Texture drop-down
list in the Fill panel. You will see no change until you change the
Amount of Texture. In the sample at the left, I have applied a Mesh
Fill to a solid fill, and increased the Amount of Texture to 71%.

Adding a texture to Fireworksfills
You can add a texture from another source or create your own texture
to use in Fireworks. Your texture file can be a PNG, GIF, JPG, BMP or
TIF. Textures can be color files, but they will be used as grayscale
images to work with the fill color.

Copy or save your texture file to the Fireworks\Settings\Textures directory.
Once the file is copied, simply select the object you wish to fill,
and select Other from the Texture drop-down list. Locate the new texture
file in the Locate File window. The texture will be added to the object,
and will be added to the drop-down list.

Tip: The Pattern files can also be used as textures. Simply
copy the files from the Pattern folder to the Textures folder and follow
the instructions above. The Pattern will appear as a texture with the
solid fill color.

Adding a Pattern fill
Patterns are similar to textures in that they are added from a separate
file. However, Patterns are displayed in color and are not affected
by the solid color assigned to an object. As an example, suppose you
have a brightly-colored jelly bean background pattern file from a separate
source that you would like to use in Fireworks. Simply copy the file
to the Fireworks\Settings\Patterns folder. Specify Pattern as the type
of fill, select other, and choose your new background file. It will
appear in full color as the fill for the selected object.

To make this feature even more exciting, you can add texture to your
pattern fills. The sample at the left shows the Brick and Aggregate
patterns at the top, and then below with the Scratch texture added at
70%.

Pattern or texture transparency
You can add transparency to the pattern, which is quite different from
adding transparency to the entire object. In the sample at the left,
a yellow rectangle has been placed behind all objects. The top set of
samples shows a a Pattern fill and a Texture fill with the transparency
applied to the fill.

The lower set of samples shows the same samples, with the texture transparency
removed, but the object transparency set to 50% (in the Objects panel
of the window with the Fill panel). Experiment with both settings to
gain an understanding of how each type of transparency affects the final
look.

We have just taken a very fast tour through the fill panel in Fireworks.
Your imagination should be taking flight about now, but there is more.

We haven't added Effects to our fills yet. Read on to see the expanded
possibilities.